Name the Victims

When a gunman murdered 50 Muslims at prayer in New Zealand, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton forthrightly expressed their solidarity with "the Muslim community." New Zealand's Prime Minister went even further, donning a hijab and leading her countrymen in paroxysms of guilt over their supposed "Islamophobia," even though the shooter was not a New Zealander and there was no evidence any New Zealander had assisted him.

The reaction was different after bombings at three churches (two Catholic, one Protestant) and three hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday killed nearly 300 and wounded hundreds more.

Unlike the Muslims killed in Christchurch, these victims bore a name that causes the great and the good to be nervous at best and disdainful at worst. Thus, both Obama and Clinton referred to the victims as "Easter worshippers," not Christians. Numerous lesser leftists followed suit.

Nor did any leftist of note call for a focus on "Christophobia," a word that is generally used in elite discourse only when denying its existence or denouncing those concerned by anti-Christian animus. But as Sri Lanka reminds us yet again, Islamist violence and anti-Christian hatred are, alas, all too real.